Oracle is now proposing that the Hudson open source CI Engine, which recently lost many of it contributors who chose to join the Jenkins fork after a trademark dispute, should be transferred to the Eclipse Foundation.

These are troubled times for Oracle's Open Source projects.

Last month it handed whatever was left of OpenOffice.org to the community at a point where LibreOffice, which forked last September, was strong enough not to turn back.

Now it is the turn of the continuous integration tool Hudson which suffered its fork in January with the majority of the developers choosing to back the re-branded Jenkins project when Oracle tried to take commercial control.

Oracle has now had a change of heart and is suggesting that Hudson should have it's governance and IP transferred to the Eclipse Foundation. The proposal includes a complete license change for the code (to the EPL) and a transfer of the domain and trademark to the Eclipse Foundation.

Oracle says it will still be a leading contributor to the project and recently the Hudson project has had new contributors from Sonatype who are working on a new plugin architecture. VMware and Tasktop have also been invited to join the project.

However it is Jenkins that has been the more active of the projects since the fork and the indications are that the breakaway element, which included Hudson's founder Kohsuke Kawaguchi, who is now running Jenkins has no inclination to join forces with the rump of the original project.

The future of Hudson with Eclipse also seems uncertain in that Kawaguchi has questioned whether Oracle has the legal clearance to reassign the Hudson intellectual property to Eclipse.

Is it too cynical to wonder if Oracle is handing it over to Eclipse simply to kill an inconvenient open source project?

What ever Oracle does seem to be making a habit of first alienating the open source community to the point that they decide to go it alone and then discovering that it really isn't work continuing with original project. One might almost think that there was a cunning plan behind it all.

Further Information

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